Hanley and Yao

We met Hanley and Yao at the Jade Buddha Temple. Outside the temple there were a lot of beggars including a little boy with a giant tumor sticking out of him neck. It was pretty sad. We got there a few minutes before them so I felt sort of uncomfortable waiting outside.

Yao and Hanley are incredibly nice. This was the first time I had spent a significant amount of time with them and they are both just very sweet. Danny also was kind enough to point out to me that I am the only one out of the four of us without a PhD. (Whatever. My master’s degree will have to do.) Anyway, even though they are really smart, they don’t tease me like Danny does.



Yao told me some interesting things about Chinese culture and translated some of the script as we looked around the temple. The Jade Buddha temple isn’t as old as some, but is famous for the large Buddha sculpture made out of jade.

I told Yao I don’t usually like Jade that much because the color makes things look washed out a lot of the time. She explained the reason it is valued so much here. The fragility of the material means that it could shatter completely if you don’t treat it properly. This is sort of symbolic of one’s soul and how you should treat it. She explained it more eloquently than that though. It was an interesting meaning but I still don’t think it is all that pretty.

The temple wouldn’t let you take pictures of the actual Jade Buddha. I think it was just because they wanted to sell postcards and not for any religious reasons though.

After we looked around we had lunch in the vegetarian restaurant inside the temple. The food was ok. There was one dish that was very spicy that I liked a lot.

Afterwards we walked to 50 Moganshan Road Art Centre. It reminded me a bit of South Street. There were a few impressive pieces plus a lot of weak pieces. There was one gallery with what looked like traditional European paintings but of Chinese subjects. There was also a giant chess board on sale for $100,000.00 that was really intricate and beautiful. The sign for it said the Medici family commissioned it but that seemed sort of hard to believe. There was one gallery that had very political pieces in an exhibit called complacency. I speculated about how the Chinese government felt about it. There was also a gallery with an exhibit called “Way Beyond the Firewall” which sounded more exciting than it was. I thought it mostly was just and excuse for some male “artists” to show a bunch of half naked women and call it art.











After we left the galleries we walked past a construction site where some graffiti artists had decked out the building. It was better than anything I saw in the galleries.